Patricia Mou

Various strategies and interventions to enhance and promote savoring have been developed including thinking about positive events, recognizing what is good in the present situation, trying to heighten one’s focus on and awareness of a present positive experience, and sharing or celebrating something good (Smith, Harrison, Kurtz, and Bryan, 2014;... See more

Rather than sticking to the script we assigned ourselves (or our structures and society assigned us), maybe we can imagine who we are, what matters to us, and what we need without focusing on “growing into” the next big thing. Maybe we can look at ourselves-as-is, rather than the ones we envisioned becoming. That’s the place everything else grows... See more

The idea of job crafting (Wrzesniewski and Dutton, 2001) is that one reflects upon one’s work environment and takes actions at work to try to (i) structure one’s tasks so that they can be done more effectively, or so that tedious tasks are no longer necessary, or so that more challenging tasks are available; (ii) have better, more meaningful, or... See more

The linear approach imagines that the meaning of our lives can be reduced to a mission, like the kind that fixes saints, heroes and social reformers in the historical imagination.

Acts of kindness, helping others, and going out of one’s way to be of assistance to those in need can, of course, increase the well-being of others. 

In this post, we outline our current models for modern-day tribe building. We hope to initiate an exchange on the topic, motivate others to look into this, too, and achieve more together.

What I really want in life are experiences, activities, and states of being, not possessions.

To bring about grand futures, we humans have to figure out how to reconcile our current needs with our lofty ambitions. Tight-knit support communities - what we call tribes in this post - seem to be a good way to preserve our well-being and values while achieving more impact. Yet, building effective tribes seems like a relatively neglected puzzle... See more

Often, there’s a desire to cling onto how we thought life should go, sometimes until it outweighs the reality of how it is going — what makes us happy, versus what we feel should; what is truly stimulating or fulfilling, versus what we’ve been told should be chased and sacrificed for. A question I ponder is: How do we untether ourselves from the... See more